Maria Simonds-Gooding. A Retrospective A Simonds-Gooding. Maria Ro y al Hibernian Academ Maria Simonds-Gooding Royal Hibernian Academy y A Retrospective Maria Simonds-Gooding A Retrospective R o y al Hibernian Academy Essay by John Yau Interview with Colm Tóibín Curator Patrick T. Murphy Published on the occasion of the exhibition Maria Simonds-Gooding. A Retrospective held at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, from September 5th to October 26th, 2014 Published by Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery 15 Ely Place Dublin 2 Ireland Edition 750 copies www.rhagallery.ie ©RHA, the artist and the authors. The RHA is indebted to the Irish Museum of Modern Art for their permission to publish the interview between the artist and Colm Tóibín which was originally commissioned by them in 2010. ISBN: 1-903875-73-0 Designed by: Jason Ellams Photography by: Denis Mortell Gillian Buckley Others as credited Printed by: Die Keure All dimensions in centimeters Front Cover: Field Dún Chaoin, Dingle Peninsula, 2004, photograph by Maria Simonds-Gooding Back Cover: Field, Dún Chaoin, Dingle Peninsula, 2014, photograph by Clare Langan 7 Foreword Patrick T. Murphy 8 Humanity’s Fragile Alliance with the Landscape John Yau 16 Colm Tóibín in conversation with Maria Simonds-Gooding 38 Paintings on paper 48 Etchings 64 Plaster works 94 Carborundum prints 104 Works on aluminium 114 Tapestries 116 Biography 120 Corporate Benefactors, Corporate Friends, Benefactors & Patrons of the RHA Foreword This exhibition continues a series of retrospective exhibitions initiated by the RHA to present and document the finest senior artists working in Ireland today. In the past decade, under this programme, we have presented work by Barrie Cooke, Martin Gale, Edward Delaney, Stephen McKenna, Robert Ballagh and Carey Clarke. We now have the honour of featuring the sublime work of Maria Simonds-Gooding. Simonds-Gooding’s work is in the best Modernist sense, reductivist. She deliberately absences the unnecessary and foregrounds only line and space to create essential worlds that are recognisable but not locatable. And yet it is all about locale, though those locations can be in the Sinai Desert, New Mexico or Kerry – all expose the ancient negotiation between man and land. If the cave drawings of Lascaux are about the hunter homo sapiens then Simonds-Gooding’s works are about subsistence farmers and the effect their toil has upon the land. Simonds-Gooding’s felds, bound by walls or ditches, do not to signify proprietorial ownership but a place won back from the wild and untamed land that surrounds it. They are statements of defiance and endurance, places where a struggle against the elementals to eek a survivalist living has left its evidence. It is also about transcendence, her images touching something deep inside our collective unconsciousness. Her schema, elegant and beautiful, suggest a algebra of traces, specifically, mankind’s agrarian efforts in places remote and severe. There are many people to acknowledge for their generosity and assistance in making this publication and exhibition possible. We are indebted to the American critic, John Yau, for engaging with the artist’s work and placing her ouvre within an international context. Also, to Colm Tóibín for his subtle prompting of the artist to yield much insight and explanation about her thoughts and processes. And a special mention to our colleagues in IMMA, Sarah Glennie, Director and Christina Kennedy, Collections Curator and former Director Enrique Juncosa for their permission to publish the Colm Tóibín interview. Our gratitude goes to the collectors, private and public, for loaning their works to the exhibition. Maria’s works are delicate and fragile and the trust of the owners is much appreciated. Finally, we are thankful to the artist for agreeing to facilitate this exhibition and for the incredible amount of time she gave to its realisation. Personally, it has been a great honour to work with Maria and come to know such a remarkable artist and a remarkable woman. Patrick T. Murphy, Director 7 Humanity’s Fragile Alliance with the Landscape John Yau Maria Simonds-Gooding’s primary subject is an inhospitable landscape where humans struggle to survive. With sensitivity and sympathy, but without nostalgia for the archaic and primitive, she registers the traces humans have made as a foothold in an otherwise unwelcoming domain. Her subjects include rugged places in India, the Sahara, the canyons of New Mexico, Mali, and the Himalayan Mountains, along with the windswept hills of Lanzarote (one of the Canary Islands), and the abandoned Blasket Islands just off the Dingle Peninsula – where, since 1968, she has lived in a fisherman’s cottage in the village of Dún Chaoin. Undeterred neither by their remoteness nor the harshness of their environment, Simonds-Gooding has travelled to these and other places, where she has become intimate with the particular relationship communities have negotiated with a ruthless topography. In a recent interview with Colm Tóibín, which is included in this catalogue, Simonds- Gooding states: “[My] preoccupation [is] with the survival and innovation of those who live off the land in the harshest conditions.” The innovations the artist alludes to are the ingenious adaptations they have made to ensure their survival in a challenging terrain, some of these having persisted into the present. In essence, such revisions of the landscape are simple and necessary – a path, stone wall, watering hole or well, tilled field and boundary line. Historically speaking, they are archetypal indications of mankind’s transition from hunting and gathering to farming and the beginnings of civilization. Focusing on specific locations, Simonds-Gooding honors the quintessential marks humans have made to survive. These are also uncongenial places where industrialization has never established itself, which would subsume the evidence of these early improvements. Since the late 1960’s, working across a wide range of mediums, including plaster, aluminium, oil on paper, drawing, prints, and tapestry, Simonds-Gooding has created a unique oeuvre both within Ireland and across the international art scene. Simply put: no one else is making work like this. Part of its uniqueness has to do with her choice of materials, particularly plaster and aluminium. Despite the diversity of her mediums, what is common to them – and here I am thinking particularly of the plaster pieces, the aluminium pieces, the tapestries and prints – is the amount of research the artist will undertake to ensure the nuanced results she desires. In her interview with Tóibín, Simonds-Gooding recounts that while considering slaked lime as an option to plaster, something that finally did not work out, she found a store in Athens, Greece, which “stocked a unique and beautiful range of natural fresco pigments and these are integral to [her] works on plaster which is also a natural material.” By mixing the fresco pigments into the plaster, she is able to get the muted colours she wants. Based on drawings, which she always does on site, often from an elevated vantage point, her plain but sensual works share a cartographic impulse, evoking sparse topographical views, a kind of bird’s eye view of the landscape. In her works in plaster and aluminium, 9 both the harshness of the landscape and the intense light of the locale are features inherent to the medium. In addition to her preoccupation with the marks mankind has made in the landscape, it seems to me that the artist is also interested in the pervasive light found in many of these places. Simonds-Gooding steadfastly believes that she can communicate both the unsympathetic reality and elemental beauty of her landscapes through the deployment of lines and abstract shapes – indications of boundaries, paths, irrigation ditches and stone walls, signs of human presence that strike, at best, a fragile alliance with nature. Working within this highly circumscribed vocabulary, she pays homage to ingenuity, adaptability and necessity. Simonds-Gooding’s self-sufficient streak, as well as her preoccupation with survival under difficult conditions, seems to have their origins in both the artist’s biography and Irish history, particularly the Great Famine in the mid-19th century. She was born in India, where her ayah or nurse largely raised her: I adored my ayah, as she did me, and it was through her that I got to know about the more earthy things of life as lived by her. Her mud home and all the spicy smells, her betel-nut which she would apply on a green leaf and the red dye left on her lips and mouth after chewing. I felt at home with her life style. It was through my ayah that I became very curious and my independence started at this early age. Often I ran away only because I wanted to see what was beyond the jungle and the trees, or down the mountain road. I was not scared in the slightest but rife with expectations and excitement about what lay outside my home and beyond.1 Shortly after World War II ended, Simonds-Gooding’s family returned to Ireland and settled in Dooks, County Kerry. She was seven. When she was in her late 20’s she moved to Dún Chaoin in the Dingle Peninsula, not far from where her family lived. Between these two major events, Simonds-Gooding studied at the National College of Art in Dublin (1962-63), Le Centre de Peinture in Brussels (1963-64) and the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, England (1966-68). It was while she was at Bath that she learned of the work of William Scott, who had once taught there. According to the former Head of Collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Catherine Marshall: [H]is mural at Altnagelvin Hospital…must have confirmed her own developing sense of simplicity and bold composition.